This topic is currently marked as "dormant"—the last message is more than 90 days old. You can revive it by posting a reply.
1lriley
The House's inability to impeach Trump shows how dysfunctional it is. There's this 'calculation' going on by Democrats whether it will hurt them or not in the next election. The thing is they'll be 'calculating' until November 2020 to find out whether their 'calculating' was worth it. A day or two ago I was watching I think MSNBC for a while and one guest commentator suggested this--that the House Democrats impeach Trump and then they can decide to send it on to the Senate where a trial would then be necessary that would result 1) with Trump eventually not being removed because the Senate is controlled by his party and there's no way two thirds are going to remove him but even so 2) he gets dragged through the mud (shit) of his presidential campaign and his presidency. Even though he's very unlikely to be removed that's not a bad option IMO.
There's a second option. One that's more a compromise to the Pelosi faction of the Democratic party that worries overmuch about protecting it's House majority. The House Democrats vote to impeach Trump and then Pelosi doesn't send it up to the Senate. McConnell and his buddies can pound salt. The point of that is--though there's no trial and no removal of the POTUS--he is then an impeached President-- and his legacy will be stained. The House impeaches--the Senate does the trial. To me this is a better than nothing option which is the way things are going now.
There's a second option. One that's more a compromise to the Pelosi faction of the Democratic party that worries overmuch about protecting it's House majority. The House Democrats vote to impeach Trump and then Pelosi doesn't send it up to the Senate. McConnell and his buddies can pound salt. The point of that is--though there's no trial and no removal of the POTUS--he is then an impeached President-- and his legacy will be stained. The House impeaches--the Senate does the trial. To me this is a better than nothing option which is the way things are going now.
22wonderY
This obvious issue has been bugging me too.
The wild corruption of Trump’s golf courses deserves more scrutiny
But I’m hung up on the Pence story and on Trump’s habit of staying at his own clubs at taxpayer expense because in comparison to the bribery side of Trump’s corruption, the outright theft is just so straightforward. There is no holder of any office in America who would be allowed to steer public funds directly to entities he controls. It’s not that this kind of corruption is unheard of by any means. What’s so shocking about it is that it’s common enough that we have tons of precedent for the idea that it’s unacceptable. The Pugh case happened to be recent and relatively high profile, but the IRS’s list of public corruption prosecutions is littered with examples of relatively minor officials going down for this sort of thing. But in Trump’s Washington it’s become kind of routine.
…
Trump has been stealing public funds out in the open from the beginning of his presidency which has tended to somewhat diminish the impact of the story relative to potentially secret scandals. There’s nothing secret about his push to host the next G7 summit at his own luxury resort in Florida, for example, but it’s extraordinarily scandalous.
There have been some worthy attempts in the media at tracking this abuse. NBC calculated that Trump spent 295 days of his first 956 days in office at his own hotels. HuffPost put the overall tab on the president’s golf outings at $102 million as of May, with a majority of that seemingly going directly to clubs he owns.
Yet public officials are not stepping up. Any other official at any other level of government would be fired if not prosecuted. It’s so obviously worthy of impeachment — the president can’t just grab public money and stuff it into his pockets — that there’s barely anything to investigate.
…
But while the reluctance to pursue the impeachment path is understandable, what’s striking is the total sense of apathy Democrats have displayed regarding this issue. There have been no message bills to bar people with business before the government from spending money at hotels, restaurants, and clubs owned by the president. There was no appropriations rider to bar the expenditure of public funds at Trump properties.
The wild corruption of Trump’s golf courses deserves more scrutiny
But I’m hung up on the Pence story and on Trump’s habit of staying at his own clubs at taxpayer expense because in comparison to the bribery side of Trump’s corruption, the outright theft is just so straightforward. There is no holder of any office in America who would be allowed to steer public funds directly to entities he controls. It’s not that this kind of corruption is unheard of by any means. What’s so shocking about it is that it’s common enough that we have tons of precedent for the idea that it’s unacceptable. The Pugh case happened to be recent and relatively high profile, but the IRS’s list of public corruption prosecutions is littered with examples of relatively minor officials going down for this sort of thing. But in Trump’s Washington it’s become kind of routine.
…
Trump has been stealing public funds out in the open from the beginning of his presidency which has tended to somewhat diminish the impact of the story relative to potentially secret scandals. There’s nothing secret about his push to host the next G7 summit at his own luxury resort in Florida, for example, but it’s extraordinarily scandalous.
There have been some worthy attempts in the media at tracking this abuse. NBC calculated that Trump spent 295 days of his first 956 days in office at his own hotels. HuffPost put the overall tab on the president’s golf outings at $102 million as of May, with a majority of that seemingly going directly to clubs he owns.
Yet public officials are not stepping up. Any other official at any other level of government would be fired if not prosecuted. It’s so obviously worthy of impeachment — the president can’t just grab public money and stuff it into his pockets — that there’s barely anything to investigate.
…
But while the reluctance to pursue the impeachment path is understandable, what’s striking is the total sense of apathy Democrats have displayed regarding this issue. There have been no message bills to bar people with business before the government from spending money at hotels, restaurants, and clubs owned by the president. There was no appropriations rider to bar the expenditure of public funds at Trump properties.
